February 13, 2000

By PETER KEEPNEWS

LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE
The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman. By Bill Zehme.
Illustrated. 368 pp. New York:
Delacorte Press. $25.95.

hen he was 21 years old, Andy Kaufman wrote to his father, ''I consider myself an unusual performer.'' He was right. Three years later, when Kaufman had become a fixture on the New York comedy-club scene, a newspaper columnist referred to him as an ''anti-comic.'' The description was accurate enough, although ''meta-comic'' might have been closer to the mark.

More than any of his stand-up peers -- most of whom, Bill Zehme suggests in his fascinating book ''Lost in the Funhouse,'' were pretty much in awe of him -- Andy Kaufman tested the limits of comedy. His comedy was about comedy, his performances about performance.

Kaufman made his initial splash by telling jokes, but they were bad jokes, told ineptly (on purpose) in an indeterminate accent. His Foreign Man was a memorable and endearing comic creation that opened doors for him and eventually led to a steady job on the sitcom ''Taxi.'' But he considered ''Taxi'' nothing more than a chore and nothing less than a sellout, and he didn't want to be known for Foreign Man alone; he had too many other selves. He was proudest of the obnoxious and untalented lounge singer Tony Clifton, for whom he created an entirely separate career. Clifton was virtually impossible to love, or even to like, and that was the idea: getting a reaction was always Kaufman's goal, and whether the reaction was laughter or anger didn't seem to matter very much.

I saw Clifton open for Kaufman at his legendary 1979 Carnegie Hall concert, the one where the entire audience was taken out for milk and cookies afterward. Zehme says Kaufman considered Carnegie Hall ''his greatest professional triumph,'' and I remember being wildly entertained from start to finish -- even if I felt like a sucker at the end when Kaufman revealed that his grandmother, who had been watching the performance from an easy chair onstage, was actually Robin Williams in drag. I also remember that when the evening was over, I had no clearer an idea of who the ''real'' Andy Kaufman was (or even if there was such a person) than I did before it began.

Despite Hollywood's recent misguided attempt to tell his story as a conventional show-biz biopic, Kaufman was a complex artist (and an artist was exactly what he considered himself) who remains elusive more than 15 years after his death. Was he a misunderstood visionary, a self-indulgent prankster, an out-of-control lunatic or simply a gifted comedian with some odd ideas about what was funny?

Zehme, whose last book was about Frank Sinatra, does not ultimately answer that question (although he strongly implies that the answer is ''all of the above''). But if he delivers no definitive verdict on Kaufman's place in the show business pantheon, he has nonetheless written the closest thing we are ever likely to get to a definitive account of his life. ''Lost in the Funhouse'' may have fewer laughs per page than the other current book about Kaufman, his friend and collaborator Bob Zmuda's memoir ''Andy Kaufman Revealed!'' But it is far more comprehensive. If you are a Kaufman aficionado, read both books; if you want the facts, this is the only one you need.

Zehme had the cooperation of Kaufman's family, as well as access to his letters and other unpublished writings, including the Kerouac-inspired poetry he read in Greenwich Village coffeehouses as an anguished Long Island teenager and the unfinished semiautobiographical novel on which he worked for many years. He also seems to have spoken to just about everyone who had more than passing contact with Kaufman: childhood friends, lovers, his longtime manager, even Johnny Carson, who gave Kaufman's career an early boost by presenting him on the ''Tonight'' show and who, according to Zehme, told the young comedian after their first on-camera encounter, ''I don't understand how you do it, but you're very funny.''

''Lost in the Funhouse'' sheds light not just on how Kaufman was able to ''do it,'' but also on what exactly it was that he did. Zehme does not deny that Kaufman had a perspective on reality that could charitably be called abnormal, and he pulls no punches in documenting the megalomania that practically brought his career to a halt well before his death from lung cancer in 1984. (For the record, he establishes persuasively that Kaufman's death was the real thing and not, as some wishful thinkers still suspect, his ultimate work of performance art.) But he marshals plenty of evidence to demonstrate that Andy Kaufman's conceptual comedy was the product not of instability but of careful thought, hard work and talent.

Zehme is meticulous in uncovering the roots of Kaufman's art. He reveals, for example, that Kaufman loved the films of Federico Fellini, and that he dreamed of starring in a remake of ''A Face in the Crowd,'' the 1957 movie in which Andy Griffith played a beloved television star who was not what he seemed. He also hoped to star in ''The Tony Clifton Story,'' and Zehme's synopsis of the screenplay Kaufman and Zmuda wrote (in which Andy Kaufman was the bad guy and Tony Clifton the hero) caused me both to laugh out loud at the tricky layers-of-reality plot and to regret deeply that the movie never got made -- a sentiment shared in retrospect, Zehme tells us, by the studio executives who rejected it.

There is no question that Zehme has skillfully assembled his story. Unfortunately, he has chosen to tell it in an extremely mannered prose style that can be both distancing and annoying, cluttered with rambling and repetitive run-on sentences and peppered with verbal tics borrowed from the Kaufman lexicon, like ''um, fine'' and ''no really.'' At times he seems to be aiming for a Kaufmanian (Cliftonian?) effect, daring the reader to keep going the way Kaufman dared an audience not to boo or walk out. At other times he seems to be writing as if from inside Kaufman's head -- a risky move for any biographer, and especially so in this case.

It's true that an unorthodox subject invites unorthodox treatment. But shouldn't a biographer, regardless of his subject, at least document his sources, as opposed to framing quotations with cute but unhelpful turns of phrase like ''Three years later he would elaborate on this theory to a reporter person''? As engrossing as ''Lost in the Funhouse'' is, I can't help wishing Zehme had tried just a little less hard to be unconventional. It worked for Andy Kaufman -- most of the time, anyway -- but it doesn't work for everyone.

Peter Keepnews writes frequently about comedy, music and popular culture.